Sebastian Thrun is a German-American entrepreneur, educator, and computer scientist. He was chief executive officer of Kitty Hawk Corporation, and is chairman and co-founder of Udacity. Before that, he was a Google vice president and Fellow, a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, and before that at Carnegie Mellon University. At Google, he co-founded Google X along with Yoky Matsuoka and Anthony Levandowski and Google's self-driving car team with Anthony Levandowski. He is also an adjunct professor at Stanford University and at Georgia Tech.
Thrun led development of the robotic vehicle Stanley which won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, and which has since been placed on exhibit in the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History. His team also developed a vehicle called Junior, which placed second at the DARPA Urban Challenge in 2007. Thrun led the development of the Google self-driving car.
Thrun is also well known for his work on probabilistic algorithms for robotics with applications including robot localization and robotic mapping.